


The King in Exile

by valadilenne



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Existential Despair, F/M, Greek Mythology - Freeform, Late Night Conversations, Self-Loathing, bughead - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-25
Updated: 2017-03-25
Packaged: 2018-10-10 07:58:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10433001
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/valadilenne/pseuds/valadilenne
Summary: “Betty operates on a certain level,” he says, still running his thumb over the chip in the table. It’s loose, maybe he can dig his nail under it and start to peel away the cheap table laminate. “She keeps me warm, and I keep her sane.” Jughead glances up at Veronica briefly to see if she gets it, but she must not listen to The Kinks. “I think all we want from each other is to hear that it’s not us, it’s everything, and everything is going to be alright.”Jughead and Veronica chatting at Pop's after midnight.





	

 

 

* * *

My crown I am, but still my griefs are mine.  
You may my glories and my state depose,  
But not my griefs; still am I king of those.  
_\- Richard II_ (4.1.3)

* * *

  

A transient life necessarily breeds insomnia. Like a teenage runaway who’s decided to take a chance hitchhiking with long-haul truckers and their greasy greedy roaming hands, you stick to the one rule: the only safe truck is the one still moving. Truck drifts toward the exit, slows down, starts to pull over—danger, Will Robinson, wake up, wake up. Jump out while you still can, before it all goes ass-end up.

Fred Andrews isn’t a serial killer. Obviously. Nor is he the type of parent who’d throw his son’s best friend out onto the street. Jughead knows this the same way he knows that facts are real. It doesn’t stop him from sneaking out, though, practicing and reestablishing muscle memory, forcing himself to remember what it’s like to wander around in the fog and drizzle, the sodium streetlights hissing sick yellow into oily pools filling up the potholes that never get fixed.

Their goodness comes easily, Fred and Arch. He sleeps in a room with a bed and a desk and a window now. The washing machine doesn’t take coins. There’s an extra cinnamon roll out of the oven for him on bright Sunday mornings. They offer him the remote first. They smile and tell him how great it is that he’s there, and he feels lighter inside.

It’s good of them. So, so good. Good and simple and clean.

And suffocating.

Which isn’t something Jughead would ever admit to. It isn’t them, it’s him. They aren’t holding a pillow to his face; he’s just weird in the head and needs strange reassurances. The Andrews men don’t need to be bowed and scraped to, he isn’t expected to do performative gratefulness, but there’s a parasite in Jughead’s brain worming around, whispering. There is an expiration date on this. A smart person would have an exit strategy. You don’t know where this is going.

So: he walks around, late at night, after the Cooper house is dark, the doors and windows bolted, the motion-detecting security system activated. He could text, but her phone goes on parentally-enforced automatic do-not-disturb at 9:45 and unless she’s watching, unless he’s been messaging her before it gets too late, it’ll only be radio silence until her profuse apologies in the morning.

Besides, he likes the mental image of her asleep. Pressed into and at the same time buoyed by a mass of pillows in her cool dark bedroom. Safe and warm, with an overstuffed down comforter, like the kind in an IKEA catalog, big squishy quilted pockets, thick and frothy, pulled up just to her chin. In his mind, she sleeps on her side, and breathes evenly, everything about her that’s wound tightly during the day now relaxed. Mouth just slightly open. Arm outstretched. Fingers gently curled. Her mind someplace else, far away. Sometimes meditating on her like this makes him drowsy, and he pretends he’s next to her, pulls the extra pillow to his chest to wrap his arms around it and synchronizes their breathing.

It has mileage—at least four or five hours’ worth of dozing.

But you can’t indulge all the time, otherwise you get used to luxury, and then when things go south you screw up the easy stuff, _rookie mistakes_ , Archie would probably say. It’s good practice to retread old stomping grounds, make sure they didn’t disappear when you weren’t around, make sure you still know how to pull an all-nighter with your laptop in a vinyl-upholstered booth.

Jughead is pretty sure he’s Pop Tate’s most reliable and also worst customer. That he alone is at least 50% of the reason Pop’s stays open 24 hours in the first place, and also mostly the reason Pop is probably going to go out of business. He can nurse free coffee refills for days at this point, weeks; even the shitty cold sludge at the end of the day, maybe.

No wonder he doesn’t sleep well.

Whoever’s waitressing tonight is somewhere in the back moving around. He doesn’t bother bugging them; they don’t need more of a burden on top of their usual work, and anyway, the reality is that his funds from the Twilight are low, even if his stomach refuses to believe his brain about that. He’s on auto-pilot to the usual booth when he looks up and sees that it’s the only one currently occupied.

Veronica doesn’t do surprised—at least not with her face. If she is surprised to see him, it’s only visible in the way her head is tilted to the side, the way her hands are clasped together on the surface of the table. His table.

He must be frowning at her, or glaring, because her mouth purses into a little smile.

“What are you doing here?” It sounds accusatory coming out of him. She glances toward the kitchen. Jughead turns and follows her gaze. “I thought your mom was working for Archie’s dad now.”

Her face goes blank and then shifts back into whatever she was doing with it before.

“I got used to keeping her company on the late shift when she worked Saturday nights. And what I learned from that is that chili cheese fries only taste good after midnight.” She looks down at the steaming plastic basket in front of her, as if perplexed and amused by that thought.

“I’m surprised you’d consume something like that.”

She shrugs.

“I tried to convince Pop to start making boba tea, but when I told him what it was, he looked at me like I’d suggested putting fugu on the menu.” She shifts the basket around on the table. “I guess people around here are really committed to the 50’s aesthetic.” Veronica doesn’t look impressed by the notion.

He’s biting back an acidic rejoinder when she extends her arm and waves it across the table in an invitation to join her. The waitress materializes; she orders them two chocolate milkshakes, extra whipped cream.

“So,” she says when he slides across the vinyl, and Jughead instinctively freezes. It’s deceptively light and airy, an officious tone of voice signaling that he’s forfeited a game he didn’t know he was playing just by sitting down. He squints at her, suspicious, and says,

“ _So_.”

There’s a long pause and a short staredown.

“You and I never spend much time with just each other, do we,” says Veronica, and pushes the fries toward him. It’s a brilliant opening salvo, and if she’s been sitting here every Saturday night for the last several months waiting for him to come in so she can bribe him into talking about himself with four thousand calories of carbohydrates and mid-grade meat byproducts, then Veronica has superhuman patience and supervillain genius.

Jughead resigns himself to this with a face, and pulls a long strand of squiggled neon cheese up over his head before it finally breaks.

“We don’t really have a reason to hang out, I guess. Not too much in common, no offense.”

She makes a small polite _hmm_ and tilts her head again, watches him work through the fries efficiently.

“But we do, though, don’t we?” She says that not like an assumption that’s already been proven, but like an actual question, and he’s still rolling it back and forth, trying to figure out which part she’s talking about, when she says, “Can I ask you something?”

He pulls the tip of his index finger from his mouth with a sharp snap and gives her a flat look. Waits for the exact question, the thing.

“Jughead’s not your _real_ name, is it?”

There it is.

“Depends on what you mean by real.”

“Meaning?”

“It’s what I go by.”

Veronica is not put off by his overt glowering and over-the-top sarcasm.

“Jughead’s not your _legal_ name, is it?”

“I… can’t even begin to imagine a universe where someone would purposely do that to a child.”

“—because for a while I thought maybe it was a cover for an embarrassing name, you know, but then I thought—how bad could it really be? Considering.”

“Considering?”

Veronica considers him for a moment.

“Archibald. Dilton. Reginald. _Moose_. Is it worse than _Moose_? What is Moose even short for?”

“Well, it’s not short for _We’re-chili-fries-besties-now-and-I’m-going-to-tell-you-my-secrets_ ,” says Jughead. And then he remembers, faintly, and mutters, “Marmaduke.”

“ _Marmaduke_ ,” says Veronica, emphatically, like this is an outrage. “Are you _kidding me_.” She turns her eyes up to the ceiling and grins. “There is a person named _Marmaduke_ , and he is real and living in this town.”

“We’re all living in this town.”

“You know what the wildest thing is,” Veronica goes on, she is relentless, she is a relentless savage and an intense fiend and he will never know peace in his life again, “Is _Betty_.”

This actually manages to stop him ruminating, both in eating and in resentful lines of thought. Veronica is already leaning back against her side of the booth and shaking her head, chuckling indulgently.

“What?”

“It’s 2016,” she says, like this is all self-evident. “Who goes by the name _Betty_ in 2016?” But she has an expression like this is _marvelous_ , like nothing is more impressive than this thing.

“You’re good at not talking about yourself,” Jughead says.

Veronica weighs this, tilting her head to one side and then the other. “I talk about myself too much in New York,” she admits. “There is so much backstory you have to learn in a place like this. You guys—you guys have history, like, _deep lore_ history.”

She means him and Archie and Betty, and yeah, they do. Deepest lore.

“All these nicknames,” she says, looking around at the empty diner. “And stories, and it’s all unspoken, like you guys just _know_ each other, and from the outside, it’s… it takes a lot of effort to study that, to try to unpack some of it.”

“We’re just teenagers,” he says, kind of lamely, poking a straw around in the dredges of his milkshake.

“No, but,” and Veronica stops. “To know a person’s whole life like that,” she says after a minute. “That’s… I don’t know _what_ that’s like.” Maybe it doesn’t bother her, or maybe that’s the veneer of aloofness. “Knowing somebody’s secrets from the ground up, they’re not really secrets then, right?”

He feels awkward, can feel the strangeness clouding around the question before he even says it, but he says it anyway:

“Did you… have a circle of friends in New York?”

Veronica gives him a half-smile that’s almost pitying, like a consolation prize for trying to get something true out of her.

“A constantly rotating cast,” she says, just to be kind to him.

He’s staring at her, staring and staring when she says quietly, looking out the blinds at the night and the reflections of the neon tubes in the windows, Veronica says fondly, “It’s… This town is _something._ ” For a moment, her eyes track across the street, following a leaf or maybe a shadow, and then she turns back to him, shakes her head again, and pulls a single fry from what’s left of the pile.

There’s another pause, and before it can stretch out so long that he has no choice but to stand up and tell her goodnight, before she can finally say that her mother is probably wondering where she is and that she should get going, Jughead says,

“It’s a double-barreled shotgun.”

Veronica doesn’t ask what he means by _it_.

“I always thought… it sounded like you’d wear a silk dressing gown, and… slippers with gold monograms on the tops. Like you’d sit in a huge velvet wingback chair smoking a fancy pipe in front of a fireplace with a giant portrait of yourself hanging above it, and in the portrait you’re holding a double-barreled shotgun and you’ve got one foot on the head of a dead lion, and that’s what it sounds like.”

She doesn’t move, doesn’t even look triumphant or smug.

“You know, not… me. I’ve got holes in my jeans, and not the on-purpose kind.”

Jughead drums his fingers on the edge of the table and glances up at her. Veronica’s mouth quirks slightly, but not like she’s smirking at him. She’s friends with Betty for a reason, and he calls to mind an image of the two of them walking down the hall together, shoulder to shoulder, Veronica watching, observing as Betty tilts her chin down and flips her ponytail from side to side in pure glee, the kind that makes Betty pull her shoulders up to her ears because it feels so good. In his mind is the expression that comes to Veronica’s face when her best friend is incandescently happy.

They’re all each other’s best friends, infinitely swirling into one another like Mandelbrot fractals. He wants to cry suddenly.

“You can’t ever use it,” Jughead says in a solemn warning, a threat, and she leans forward in one swift motion, puts her weight into her elbows on the table.

“Oh my God,” says Veronica, all in. “Yes. Absolutely. I swear.”

“My name is _Jughead_ ,” he says in that same warning voice, stabs one finger into the tabletop, and Veronica nods, huge.

He breathes in, then gives the recitation.

“Forsythe Pendleton Jones the third.”

Veronica immediately puts one knuckle against her top lip and sinks back into the booth cushion, looking thoughtful.

“That _is_ a name.”

“Yeah.” He shifts, looks around at the empty diner like there’s anyone there to listen or even give a shit. “But really, don’t.” It feels arbitrary right then, like it mattered once and now, sitting here in Veronica’s measured gaze, closer to adulthood, it’s like insisting on something small and faded, a plastic toy tricycle you used to climb onto and push around that’s been sitting forgotten in a weed patch for the past ten years.

“So, where did Jughead come from?”

“Me.”

“Inspired by?”

“Inspired by… being a weirdo kid,” he says, frustrated at how it comes out of his mouth. “Like any kid. When my sister was little, she tried to name our family dog, and wanted us to vote on her final choices: Crocodile, or Monster Truck.”

Veronica laughs.

“So which is it?”

“Well, luckily a cooler head—” He points to himself, “—prevailed, and although my intervening was met with a lot of arguing and stomping around, he was so lazy and sweet that hardcore names just didn’t fit. So Hot Dog it was.”

“See!” says Veronica, throwing up her hands. “All these stories I’d miss out on, and all because you and I only hang out in a group context.”

He sizes her up for a moment.

“But you three,”—and there it is again, she circles back around to them with something close to longing—“You three are fascinating.”

He thinks it must be loneliness at the top of the pyramid that’d make someone put so much stock into childhood friendships that have lurched and stumbled, badly-maintained, into adolescence.

“How so?”

“A _triangle_ ,” she says, like she’s seizing on a eureka moment, and it’s the most excited he’s ever seen Veronica Lodge. “That’s practically impossible to keep going.”

“No, we’re not,” Jughead says, a little bit annoyed. Quite a bit annoyed. Like a love triangle.

“No?”

Like this: _well, what **do** you call it?_

He’s never thought of them as a triangle. They were dots on a line, and no matter what the context, Jughead realizes he’s always assumed that Archie was in the middle. Jughead on the left; Betty on the right. No matter the context, no matter who had the most interesting thing going on that week, it was Archie in the middle, Archie at the center of everything, Archie like a planet’s core, drawing them around him with passive gravity. Inadvertently eclipsing him and Betty from each other.

And maybe Archie pulled so hard and so fast all of a sudden, upward and away, that he became the top of the triangle, stretching the sides, leaving Betty and Jughead with nothing but a thin stub of a line to share.

“Betty used to call us the Three Musketeers.”

Veronica smiles at this.

“I won’t ask you who’s who, but I bet I can guess who Aramis is,” she says, playfully.

“You’re kind of a D’Artagnan, come to think of it,” he tries, but she won’t fall for it, she says instead:

“And you and Betty, boyfriend and girlfriend, after all this time.”

—and he thinks vaguely that it’s odd how she’s chosen to do that without fanfare, like it’s normal. Maybe she’s not very observant, maybe she really doesn’t see the significance.

Or maybe it doesn’t matter, after all.

We’re just teenagers.

Jughead wishes he could remember all the words to the Litany Against Fear.

Instead, he stares into the empty fountain glass, scummed over and cloudy with whipped cream.

“I think it’s sweet,” Veronica says, and he has the silent thought, even before he actually thinks the words, that _of course you think it’s sweet, you read Nicholas Sparks_ , “You make a good couple, it’s _healthy,_ which is so rare, I mean, definitely for people our age. Not that I knew what you were like before, but—you’re both so happy around each other, and…”

Veronica stirs around for the word.

“Content. At peace with yourselves.”

He sits there in the booth, breathing. It’s awesome, in the old way of the word, awe-some, to watch Veronica do this, to talk about something that exists, that other people can obviously see, but that makes him feel like his chest is going to cave in from the pressure every time he thinks about it as if it’s real. It’s easy for her, casually tossing everything onto the table, when he can’t even find a word for it, let alone say it out loud, and he’s the one _in it_ , and he’s filled with a sickened hate for her so quickly that he swallows and it almost tastes like bile.

“Aren’t you?”

He looks up. Veronica leans forward, watching him carefully for signs of life—or maybe she’s concerned, he can’t tell, it’s too late at night, she’s managed to slip her hand and then her entire arm between his ribs, thrashing and fishing around inside of him when _he’s_ the detective, the weight of his entire future on this unfinished book being discovered like a naive hopeful little small-town rube, and sometimes he tries to tell Betty, warn her that his heart feels like it’s charred and smoking, burning from the inside out and she just smiles and takes his hand and changes the subject back to her sister, and instead of sleeping like a normal human being he lies awake at night worried about not murderers but just _how much_ genetics he inherited from his dad, how soon the addiction will rise up, because it’s only a matter of time, how many more good months left are there—

“—she makes me feel like glitter is exploding inside me,” Jughead says. He can’t stop running his thumb across a chip in the chrome edging on the table; he can’t look at Veronica. It’s the worst thing he’s ever said.

It’s true, though.

Betty smiles at him, and it’s like he can believe anything, he can hear her thoughts just by looking her in the eye. They’re bound through a neural network, a hivemind that’s only available to them on their tiny side of the triangle. A shortwave radio connection that her voice crackles through, a distant and terrifying numbers station that he can’t stop listening to. Betty says outrageous things, big tall things— _we’re gonna get you out of here; I’m not gonna let that happen_ —and when she does, it is beautiful and absolute truth. When she does, Jughead closes his eyes, takes a deep breath, and for just a moment lets himself be in a liminal space that isn’t there, but isn’t anywhere in particular, either. Not an interrogation room. Not the room under the staircase. Not the rutted-out muddy tire tracks with a bit of gravel slung over the top that qualify as roads at Sunnyside Trailer Park.

Every time Betty touches him, she brings her hand up to his face decisively, not the slightest bit of shame or hesitation, and he’s almost embarrassed for her, but she gets this grave, solemn look, like it’s for _real_ the way a mortgage or a life insurance policy is real, and serious, and those don’t warrant his chest finally releasing and turning into a thousand little things catching the light, but that’s how it _feels_ , and is that real if it’s inside of him where he can’t even see it?

She has everything, and so much of it.

“That’s lovely,” says Veronica’s voice, quiet and gentle. She means it. “Have you told her that?”

“Betty operates on a certain level,” he says, still running his thumb over the chip in the table. It’s loose, maybe he can dig his nail under it and start to peel away the cheap table laminate. “She keeps me warm, and I keep her sane.” Jughead glances up at Veronica briefly to see if she gets it, but she must not listen to The Kinks. “I think all we want from each other is to hear that it’s not us, it’s everything, and everything is going to be alright.”

“I don’t think you give her enough credit,” she says, poking around inside her fountain glass with a straw. Jughead folds his arms on the table and finally looks at Veronica. She’s getting that too-late-night look that girls get, little lines of flaked mascara beneath her lower lashes, a blurriness in the eyes. Signs of imperfection, clues to humanity. “Or yourself.”

He waits.

“See, I think you’re like Hades and Persephone.”

Jughead scoffs.

“ _That’s_ not offensive. Or derivative and puerile _at all_.”

“No, hear me out,” Veronica says. “And—forget the patriarchal bullshit about abduction and male ownership of women through marriage. Myths change when we look at them through different lenses over time, right?”

“Sure.”

“Some scholars believe that Persephone was complicit in the whole thing, that she conspired with him, or with someone else, that she was sick of her controlling and suffocating mother, of being walled up in a garden and forced to play innocent sweet little flower-crown fairy princess her whole life.”

“And what about me?”

“An antisocial outsider picked the wrong stick in the magical god lottery for realms.” Veronica twirls the straw between her fingers. “He got unlucky and wound up having to oversee the dead.”

Jughead realizes suddenly that he still hasn’t chosen a title for his novel.

“So a miserable emo and a psychological victim are trapped together for eternity. Great, that’s cool to hear,” he replies. “We’re both a mess, it’s fated, the end.”

“But think about how they both come out of it. Hades was lonely, but falls in love. And Persephone—”

“Shuttled back and forth between a loveless marriage and having to live with her mom?”

“It’s an _allegory_ ,” Veronica sighs. “She becomes a queen and a goddess in her own right by going after what’s forbidden to her: sexual power.”

Jughead can feel the whites of his eyes go exposed to the dry air of the diner.

“Okay, if you don’t want to think about it that way, she self-actualizes and finally gains some control over her own life and destiny. She develops _agency_.”

“That still doesn’t scan—how does ancient mythology give Betty anything?”

Veronica suddenly looks wide awake.

“There is a darkness to that girl,” she says, sounding surprised. “You don’t know how lucky you are to be able to wear yours out in the open. Betty’s got to keep that shit wound up tight to survive. It vents in unexpected ways.”

She doesn’t know what she’s talking about, and she does, at the same time. He can’t figure out if she’s good or bad at reading people, if she gets it or if she has no clue.

“What do you mean?” Jughead says carefully, and Veronica looks down at her hands.

“It’s not my place to say. But I am telling you,” and she looks up at him, pensive, “I’ve seen Betty be a lot more complicated than she lets on to people, and I’m not sure she realizes it herself.”

Veronica looks out over the diner, and they both listen to the faint droning hum of the neon lights, the only sound they can hear.

“I don’t worry about her, exactly,” Veronica says quietly, looking uncertain, “But sometimes… I don’t know. Out of everything weird that goes on around here, I wouldn’t put _Betty_ at the top of the list of mysteries to crack.”

He wouldn’t have either, come to think of it. 

This is—he's not sure what to do with this. This _Gedanken_ , this nesting set of paradoxes. Veronica as outsider, Veronica as insider. Betty as friend, Betty as dread queen. Archie somewhere, and Jughead—usurped by each of them, and nowhere in between. 

It isn’t until after Veronica leaves the diner—a large black car with too-white headlights and too-dark windows appears outside, and she murmurs that it’s been cool catching up, like they’ve been on winter break—that he sees she’s tucked a fifty discreetly under her milkshake glass. He closes his laptop and packs his bag before he can start to feel the growing creep of shame start to bleed over to his side of the booth. 

Jughead goes home—somebody else's home—and tries to sleep, tries not to look at the black yawning window across the narrow strip of grass between the yards. 


End file.
